


we're not just friends

by beautify



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 12:36:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15291660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautify/pseuds/beautify
Summary: Tsukishima works a nine-to-five in Tokyo. Kuroo is a host. And they’re roommates.





	we're not just friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roadhouss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roadhouss/gifts).



> DISCLAIMER: i don’t know anything about host clubs. i watched ouran high school host club but it was shockingly not very educational and actually i think it made me a more stupid person so there you go

“Salarymen are my favorite,” Kuroo tells him one day, in the middle of summer, when the pavements are scalding hot and their aircon bill is always too high and people keep bringing watermelons into the office — but Tsukishima doesn’t recall asking. He burns himself on the metal of his seatbelt as he’s climbing in.

For some reason Kuroo continues. “I think they’re cute,” he says. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Um,” Tsukishima says, and then — because if he had a husband he wouldn’t let them pay money to have a stranger act cute for them — “Aren’t some of them married?”

“Not all of them.” Kuroo looks at him in the rearview mirror. Tsukishima has been late to work every morning this week and it’s because Kuroo likes to bide his time harassing Tsukishima when they’re commuting. This morning Kuroo didn’t even wait until Tsukishima was finished brushing his teeth to use the sink, just stood next to him while he shaved his face, and didn’t back down when Tsukishima paused and frowned at him. Fine. Tsukishima goes to work in Kuroo’s car, so what can he do. It just wouldn’t do to complain.

Tsukishima thinks, in a kind of spoilt, pettish way, that if Akiteru knew Kuroo was treating him this way, he wouldn’t allow it. Instead Tsukishima puts up with it — with not being allowed to sleep in the car on the way to work, with finding Kuroo sitting in front of the open refrigerator at one in the morning, shirt off, fanning himself, throat wet with sweat. He wishes Kuroo would be more considerate. Sometimes it’s like Kuroo doesn’t know how to drop the act, like he comes home in the middle of the night thinking he still has to smile that filed-and-bonded smile, and run his hand through his hair, and offer Tsukishima something to drink.

Tsukishima doesn’t say any of this to Kuroo, who’s still talking about all the lonely men and women in his life.

“Does your mother know what you do out here?” Tsukishima asks.

“She thinks I have someone taking care of me.”

“Is that true?” Then it hits Tsukishima how that sounds. “She thinks you don’t have to work at all? You just lay around the house like a delinquent, doing as you please?”

The car door unlocks. Kuroo’s car is stopped outside the shiny office complex where Tsukishima works.

“I wouldn’t want her to think I’m slaving away here,” Kuroo says, smiling. So maybe Kuroo’s mother is a lot like Tsukishima’s: very doting and sweet, not very particular about what he’s getting up to.

Tsukishima’s going to be late for work again. Still, he stays in the passenger seat and gives Kuroo some kind of look. Maybe Tsukishima doesn’t want to go into work. A part of him wishes Kuroo would just keep driving, driving, driving until they left the city altogether, and maybe they could work on a peach farm, one where they grow those sweet, white peaches they put in candy flavoring.

Kuroo snaps his fingers in front of Tsukishima’s nose. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

Tsukishima bats his lashes at him. What’s wrong with him today? Peach farm. Good grief. All this hot weather is making him delirious.

“I’ll see you later, Kuroo-san,” he says — flushed and a little bit pink and feeling dried out somehow, like an old rose petal — and then steps out of the car, into the heat.

 

*

 

Sometimes when Kuroo isn’t home Tsukishima buries his face in Kuroo’s pillow and breathes in his weird musk. The chemical smell of his hair product. Tsukishima doesn’t know what he’d do if Kuroo caught him. Probably throw something at him and pretend it never happened, though honestly Kuroo is such a pervert that he’d probably like it.

This is what he’s thinking about when he sits in his cubicle at work. _Salarymen are my favorite._ Tsukishima puts his headphones in and tries to drown out the noise in his head for the rest of the day.

 

*

 

Later, when Tsukishima is on the train home — headphones in, sitting by himself, the train floor shivering beneath his shoes — he thinks about how Kuroo’s probably heading into work around now, at 6PM, and how that seems kind of lonely. Kuroo spends most of the morning asleep, on his too-small futon in his too-hot bedroom without air-conditioning, with the blinds closed and his face buried in his pillow, shying away from the sunlight like a misplaced bat, and doesn’t wake up until late in the afternoon. But before that, before he goes to sleep, he drives Tsukishima to work.

“Isn’t that sweet,” people say, including Kuroo, who’s always so proud of himself, even though Tsukishima never says thank you, even though at nine in the morning Tsukishima is sulky and tired and only wants to go back to bed.

“It’s not worth the trouble,” he always says, to which Kuroo snaps, “That’s not for you to decide, Kei-chan. Why won’t you let me be nice to you?”

If you listened to Kuroo you’d think all he’d ever wanted was to be nice to Tsukishima. You would think Kuroo was living his dream out here in Tokyo, going to bed at four or five in the morning, after spending all night purring and making eyes at businessmen and saying things like, “You were in my dream last night, you know…”

Possibly Kuroo is having a better time than Tsukishima in all this, since when Kuroo comes home he’s not tired or burnt out the way Tsukishima is after eight hours of sitting in a cubicle. Possibly Kuroo doesn’t even think of this as some kind of transitional stage — Kuroo doesn’t ever give off the impression that he’s got his eyes set on something better than a shitty apartment somewhere in Tokyo, that he thinks one day he’ll move out and take all of it with him: his potted vegetable garden on the balcony, his beat-up car, the tubes of bronzer he pretends he doesn’t use in winter when his tan starts to fade.

Tsukishima is, as Kuroo puts it, a country bumpkin at heart, so to be honest he never thinks about it either — about where he’d like to go, what he wants, who he wants it with. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing in Tokyo. His mother married her highschool sweetheart. Akiteru wandered off for college, but then he came home to roost, so that doesn’t count. Anyway, the point is: a part of Tsukishima still wakes up in Tokyo thinking soon he’ll be back on the bullet train, soon he’ll be on the bus from Sendai to Torono, soon he’ll be home again, back in some quiet, nowhere town in Miyagi — just waiting, he guesses, for something, someone, to happen to him.

 

*

 

It’s the end of watermelon season when Kuroo falls sick and has to take a week off work.

“Isn’t there a no-touching rule at that club of yours?” Tsukishima puts his hands on his hips. “Not that I would know.”

“It’s not my fault,” Kuroo says, voice hoarse, and then rolls over on his futon so he’s on his back, looking up at Tsukishima. “People just can’t keep their hands off me.”

Tsukishima sticks his tongue out. “Ew.”

“ _Ew_ ,” Kuroo mimics, all petulant, crinkling his nose and bunching up his shoulders in a not exactly wrong impression of Tsukishima. Then he pauses. He flutters his eyelashes at Tsukishima. “Kissing is so gross, right, Kei-chan?” He grins. “That’s okay, just leave it all to me.”

Poor Kuroo-san, Tsukishima thinks, kneeling down to touch his hand to Kuroo’s forehead, checking for a temperature. The heat must be making him feel strange too.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” Kuroo says, brows pinched, his skin glazed in sweat. Five in the afternoon is to Kuroo what midnight is to cats, so it’s completely predictable that he gets all riled up when Tsukishima wanders around and ignores him. “I want barley tea,” Kuroo says, and then frowns when Tsukishima brings him a glass of warm water (which in Tsukishima’s mind tastes exactly the same) even though Kuroo’s never in his life bought barley tea — he probably saw it in a movie once and wanted it for himself, the whole I-come-when-you-call: honey and lemon in his tea, a damp towel dabbed on his forehead, an infirmary room kiss. “Tsukki, Tsukki,” he sighs, flinging his hand over his forehead in a way he knows no one can take seriously, “are you really going to leave me all alone? What would your mother say?”

All of this is ridiculous, even for Kuroo, who when he’s sick usually loses his mind and drags Tsukishima with him to the health store that they really can’t afford, and comes home with bags of fruit leather and organic shampoo and milk thistle supplements for gout, which Kuroo doesn’t have, and then falls asleep on the sofa and wakes up sixteen hours later, as fresh and winsome as ever. But that’s not what’s going to happen today, and Tsukishima doesn’t really know why, or even how he knows, it’s just. The way Kuroo looks at him. How hot his head feels, how heavy, like his brain’s been soaked in honey.

“What do you want?” Tsukishima says, hovering in the doorway, ready to make a run for it if Kuroo says something gross.

“Come here.”

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. “No.”

“Fine,” Kuroo snaps, and then shuffles around his futon, lying on his side so he can’t see Tsukishima anymore. He hasn’t touched his water. The fan is unplugged and Kuroo’s shirt is rucked up, trying to get rid of all that heat. And then: “Are you just gonna stand there and watch me all day?”

This stupid city boy, Tsukishima thinks. This idiot who always forgets to water his plants and who spends forty minutes every morning messing around with his hair, who keeps calling Tsukishima at two in the morning because he forgets not everyone is living on the other side of the day, and then coos when he hears Tsukishima mumbling on the other end of the line, sleepy and confused and a little bit mean, but only a little bit. “You’re not as bad as you think you are,” Kuroo tells him, once in a while.

No, Tsukishima’s not going to stand here and watch Kuroo all day. It’s not that bad, not yet. Except. When Tsukishima goes and sits cross-legged next to Kuroo on the futon, his hair smells just like that health store shampoo. That tang of lavender. For a moment Tsukishima wants to lie down too, and bury his face in Kuroo’s pillow and breathe in deep and never out again — but then Kuroo tries to put his head in Tsukishima’s lap and Tsukishima is forced to flick Kuroo’s ear and skitter off to the kitchen where Kuroo can’t despoil his legs with his germs.

“You’re such a bastard, Tsukishima,” Kuroo calls from the bedroom. “This is why you don’t have a boyfriend!”

Tsukishima resents that. He doesn’t have a boyfriend because living with Kuroo and thinking about Kuroo and letting Kuroo mess him around leaves him with a certain residue, the pheromonal equivalent of lipstick on his collar. But he doesn’t say any of that out loud, because Kuroo probably already knows.

In the late evening when Kuroo’s passed out, his legs tangled up in sheets on his futon, Tsukishima turns out the lights in his room, and rinses rice in the kitchen, and wonders whether he should make okayu, if that’s something Kuroo would even want. Then he thinks: who cares what Kuroo wants, and makes it anyway, and wakes Kuroo up to eat — at first by nudging his cheek, and then by stepping on him. Softly.

“Ow,” says Kuroo quietly, voice syrupy, eyes half-lidded.

Tsukishima leaves the bowl on the floor next to Kuroo’s head, and then leaves and shuts the door firmly behind him.

 

*

 

The summer seems to last forever. Not much changes: Kuroo goes back to work, their aircon breaks down three times a week, and every day Tsukishima sits in his cubicle and daydreams about his awful roommate, thinking that it’ll get worse before it gets better, this stupid crush of his, because nothing can ever go right for him. And just to prove it, their landlord turns up out of nowhere one morning while Kuroo’s fixing Tsukishima’s tie and makes a point of mentioning a nice and spacious 1BR he’s looking to rent out.

“No,” Tsukishima tells Kuroo, once the landlord’s gone and they’re alone again.

Kuroo looks over at him, blinking, one hand still on Tsukishima’s shoulder. “Did I say something?”

“We’re not sharing a bedroom.”

Kuroo frowns at him. “I know we’re not.”

 _Stop playing dumb_ , Tsukishima wants to say, but then he realizes Kuroo really wasn’t considering it at all. He feels himself flushing. It’s embarrassing, the look Kuroo gives him, like he has no earthly idea what Tsukishima’s talking about.

“There’s jam on your mouth,” Tsukishima says, switching track, and then throws a napkin at Kuroo’s face. “Hurry up. I’m going to be late.”

“Well I don’t even want to drive you if you’re going to be like that,” Kuroo says, licking his mouth and getting nowhere near the jam. Tsukishima can’t stand it. He storms out the door and goes to wait outside the elevator.

“You forgot your glasses,” Kuroo says, later, when the two of them are in the parking lot. “And your briefcase.”

“I thought you were carrying it for me,” Tsukishima lies.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kuroo drawls, a knowing look in his eye. He opens the car door on the passenger side and thumps Tsukishima on the back with the briefcase. “Get in, princess.”

Tokyo in the summer is unbearable, Tsukishima thinks, but somehow Kuroo is worse.

 

*

 

Lately Tsukishima doesn’t get an awful lot of work done at the office, but the strange thing is that no one else seems to mind. Over the course of eight hours he gets Yamaguchi to kill two bugs for him, tries out six different hand creams from various coworkers, rediscovers his fragrance allergy, sulks, smells like a plum, types up three quarters of a report, and ignores Yamaguchi’s looks of despair when he locks the only electric fan in their shared cubicle so that it only faces him.

He gives up on work all together when Kuroo decides to visit him out of nowhere with a bento in tow, despite the fact that it’s three in the afternoon and Kuroo’s not even supposed to be alive yet, let alone smiling at the receptionist and rocking on the balls of his feet and telling her, no, it’s no problem to wait, he knows how busy Tsukishima is.

“Oi, Tsukishima, do you really know that guy?” Tsuzuki-san hisses, poking her head into Tsukishima’s cubicle.

“No,” Tsukishima says, but what’s the point in even trying. He narrows his eyes. “Why? Do you know him?”

“I’ve never seen him out of his uniform before,” she says, sounding thoughtful. Kuroo’s headed towards them. Uniform, Tsukishima thinks, uniform uniform uniform. Oh.

“So this is where you work, huh, Kei-chan?” Kuroo says, leaning against the doorframe. He looks around the office, at all the dinky little cubicles and the slats of dusty sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, at the cheap neckties and the worn blazers and the rolled up sleeves, at Tsuzuki-san eyeing him up in her kitten heels, and maybe, Tsukishima thinks, at the barest hint of a garter strap where Tsukishima’s slacks have ridden up and his socks are a little too short — and then nods and says, “Cute, cute.”

“Who are you calling Kei-chan,” Yamaguchi mutters, under his breath, at the same time that Tsuzuki-san cocks her head and says, “Kuroo-san, you’re not on the clock, are you?” at which point Tsukishima realises that Tsuzuki-san, a) knows Kuroo from his club, which begs further inquiry, and b) thinks that Tsukishima would pay Kuroo real money to do this.

“Kuroo-san certainly isn’t,” says Tsukishima primly. He takes a moment to glare at Kuroo, then straightens his back and spins around in his chair. “Kuroo-san should be resting at home,” and not here, doing this, whatever this is. But the only thing worse than having Kuroo see this part of his life — this totally ordinary, utterly sanitary, really very boring part — is having everyone else see the other part of his life, the part that’s all Kuroo, Kuroo, Kuroo, who isn’t any of those things. So he gets up.

“Let me walk you to your car, Kuroo-san,” he says.

“But I only just—”

“Come on.” As he’s brushing past, Tsukishima hooks one of Kuroo’s belt loops and gives him a tug. “Let’s go,” he says, and then once they’re in the parking lot, standing next to Kuroo’s car: “Give me your keys.”

Kuroo makes a dumb face. “What?”

“Get the train home,” Tsukishima tells him, stepping forward to put his hand in Kuroo’s pocket. He wonders what this looks like from five, ten feet away. Kuroo’s still holding onto that bento: the box is small and bright red like a cherry tomato, the same color as Kuroo’s car. It’s hard to take his eyes off it.

“I’ll pick you up at work,” Tsukishima says, finally fishing Kuroo’s keys out of his pocket. That took longer than it should have.

“How am I supposed to get to work without my car?” Kuroo grumbles, but he knows exactly how and he’s probably already thinking about what time he’ll have to get up to catch the train. “Hey,” he says, looking up, “take this.”

Kuroo lifts his bento to Tsukishima’s face. Tsukishima scrunches up his nose. “Oh my god, Kuroo-san.”

“You’re awful,” Kuroo complains, but he doesn’t back down. “Come on, take it! I put tuna in it. You love tuna.”

“I hate tuna,” Tsukishima says, without much feeling. “You like tuna. You take it.”

“Hmmm,” Kuroo says, considering. He blinks slow like a cat in love. Is he drunk? Tsukishima wonders. It’s very hard to tell with Kuroo, who doesn’t get wobbly or teary or start talking about how much he loves Tsukishima, which is what Akiteru does, ew, how embarrassing — so maybe this is what Kuroo does when he drinks. “Okay,” Kuroo says, “I’ll take it. But only because you want me to so badly.” He sighs and looks blue for a moment. “You’re so nice to me, Tsukki.”

Tsukishima pulls a face. He really can’t tell at all. Maybe he should get Kuroo to come back inside and eat something first. Maybe even let him nap. Tsukishima is good at looking for places to nap at inopportune times. He has blankets at the office and everything. He steals Yamaguchi’s lumbar support pillow all the time.

But it would be too much, he thinks, to do all that for Kuroo, to go out of his way so shamelessly. And at work, too. So it’s for the best if Tsukishima takes Kuroo’s car keys and sends him on his way.

“Well,” Tsukishima says, wondering what to say. He wrings his hands. It’s so dizzyingly hot in the parking lot — he can feel the heat of the asphalt rising up through the soles of his loafers, the sun beating down on his face, and when Kuroo tries to lean on his car he gets scalded by the shiny red paint, blazing hot in the sunlight. Tsukishima flushes. He feels like a plant wilting; he’s sweating through his button-up and he can feel the sweat on his neck, dripping down his collar. He clears his throat. “Bye, Kuroo-san,” he says.

“See you, Kei-chan,” Kuroo says, smiling a little sheepishly, putting his hands in his pockets. Tsukishima scowls at him. Then he turns around and walks off to go find an ice-cold Pocari Sweat to put on his cheek. Five more minutes of talking to Kuroo Tetsurou isn’t worth heatstroke. In fact five minutes of conversation with Kuroo Tetsurou feels a lot like heatstroke because Kuroo has no propriety, no decorum — Tsukishima can’t believe someone would pay to talk to him. Multiple times. On a regular basis, even. He’s going to ask Tsuzuki-san about that. He wants to know why anyone would come running back, though truthfully he’s much worse, because as it stands right now, he’s never even tried to run away.

 

*

 

What Tsukishima forgets is that picking up Kuroo from work means staying up until two in the morning, driving Kuroo’s flashy car to a flashy part of the city, and sitting around in the lounge of Kuroo’s club with a complimentary mystery drink while staff members give him odd looks and try to dance around him as they close up.

“Would you like another drink, Tsukishima-san?” someone says, and Tsukishima doesn’t know how she knows his name, but he smiles faintly anyway and shakes his head and says no thank you. “Kuroo-san will be out in a minute. Are you sure you don’t want anything? We have sorbet,” she tells him, eyes twinkling like she knows this about him, which is when Tsukishima begins to see the appeal, and why when Kuroo comes strolling up to him five minutes later, he’s got a silver spoon in his mouth and his mouth is bright pink, like a cloud at sunrise.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Kuroo says, a jacket folded over his arm, a little bit of eyeliner smudged at the corner of his eye. He doesn’t sound very sorry. “Come on, we’ll take the back exit.” When Tsukishima stands up his knees wobble. “So, Tsukki,” he says casually, throwing his arm around Tsukishima’s shoulders once they’re outside, “how come you’re being so nice to me tonight? You’re not always nice, you know.”

“Really,” says Tsukishima dryly.

“Yeah, really,” Kuroo says, laughing. “You’re the worst person I know. You should be a host.”

“Kuroo-san,” Tsukishima says weakly. For some reason Kuroo’s taken them into a narrow back alley with no street lighting, and so Tsukishima can hardly make out anything in the dark except flashes of Kuroo’s smile. He furrows his brows. “I thought the parking lot was the other way.”

“We’re taking the scenic route,” Kuroo says. He curses under his breath when a street cat hisses at him and then leaps behind a dumpster. Then he nudges Tsukishima with his hip. “Anyway, it’s true. You could be a host. You probably got loads of chocolates in high school, right?”

“No,” Tsukishima says.

“Liar,” Kuroo says. “I bet giving you chocolate was like pulling teeth.”

Tsukishima looks down at him. “I’ll bite you,” he says.

“You do that,” Kuroo says, and then a lot of things happen all at once and so fast that Tsukishima feels blindsided — one minute they’re stumbling through the dark and the next his back is against a brick wall and suddenly it doesn’t feel so cold anymore, suddenly Kuroo’s body is pressed against his, suddenly Tsukishima’s aware of Kuroo gazing up at him through his lashes, still smiling in that catlike way of his.

Tsukishima swallows and he knows Kuroo can hear it.

“Kei-chan, take your glasses off so I can kiss you properly,” Kuroo says sweetly, and then beams when Tsukishima does.

Getting a kiss from Kuroo is honestly the worst thing that’s ever happened to Tsukishima: it makes him feel dizzy and hot and light on his feet, it makes his knees weak and it makes him shiver when Kuroo just barely touches his neck, and his face feels warm and his heart feels weird and Kuroo’s mouth is like the soft inside of a strawberry and now Tsukishima will never be able to eat a strawberry ever again.

“You taste like our stupid sorbet,” Kuroo says, when he pulls away.

“How can sorbet be _stupid_ ,” Tsukishima whines, and then covers his face because how could Kuroo say something like that after what just happened?

“It costs a thousand yen?”

“That’s not my fault!” Tsukishima snaps, and then shoves Kuroo off him. “I want to go home right now.”

“Yeah, well, you took my car keys, so,” Kuroo says, and wipes his mouth. Tsukishima starts looking around for something to throw at him. He feels cold all over again, and still shaky, and he wishes it wasn’t so dark and that Kuroo didn’t look like that: relaxed and almost bored. Well, Tsukishima thinks meanly, Kuroo’s obviously used to things like this.

“Hey, snap out of it, loverboy,” Kuroo says, putting a hand on Tsukishima’s shoulder. “You look like you’re gonna pass out. I think I’ll drive.”

“I think you will,” Tsukishima says, glaring.

“Because I know it’s past your bedtime,” Kuroo continues, putting a hand over his heart, “and I’m a very good boyfriend.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend,” Tsukishima says, walking past him.

“Yes I do,” says Kuroo, trailing after him like an ugly duckling. Above them, the moon is full and glowing.

“No you don’t.”

“…But I do,” Kuroo says, and then starts laughing at himself like the idiot he is, and buries his face between Tsukishima’s shoulder blades. Tsukishima doesn’t shake him off. But only because he’s tired.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are part of my recommended daily intake please don't leave me to die!


End file.
